Columbia

A Victorian solution for delicate sensibilities.

They’re outraged, the students at Columbia University—outraged that their professors would dare to put Ovid on mandatory reading lists, outraged that the ancient Roman author doesn’t share their sensitivities, outraged that a modern education would include something so . . . so . . . so unmodern, dammit. Something so vile, so visceral, so triggering of all the thoughts we must not think in these days of the new morality.

Which is an irony, of a kind, since the university’s description of the core-curriculum text insists that Ovid is “a particularly modern poet”—by which the school means an older sense of the word modern: mocking, genre-busting, and suspicious of received pieties. Nevertheless, in an op-ed this spring in the school newspaper, several students on Columbia’s “Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board” denounced Ovid’s Metamorphoses because its depictions of the rapes of Persephone and Daphne are too much for college women to bear. One young woman in particular “described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape” and related how offended she was by her professor’s focus on “the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery.”

Ovid’s Metamorphoses may be “a fixture” on the college reading list, the students conclude, “but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom.” And so out he must go.

Fortunately, there may be a way to save poor Ovid—the beauty of his language, the splendor of his imagery. Ours is not the first society to be in this position, after all, caught between one cultural impulse that praises the artistry of a text and another cultural impulse that feels offense at the explicitness of its sexual descriptions. The feminist phrasings of the current indictment of Ovid hide their return to the old, old revulsion of the Victorians at the grossness of this world—a return to a spiritualizing and moralizing of the body.

Or, at least, a spiritualizing and moralizing of women’s bodies. This isn’t feminism but a priggishness that has seized feminism as a handy club with which to beat the culture into submission. Mrs. Grundy has returned as Ms. Grundy, revenant and ready to take offense.

Even the vocabulary of rape on America’s campuses hides the reality that prissiness is making a return. Perhaps some activists have deliberately tried to expand the meaning of the word rape because the word is so fraught, so immediately identifying of the horrible and indefensible. But for many, the word has grown in meaning simply because they have no other moral vocabulary. The only wrongness they know for sex is rape, and so every wrongness about a sexual encounter—every violation of their newly moralized sense of the body—must end up being called rape. And then, when they read something like the divine rapes in Ovid’s mythological accounts, all the possible wrongnesses of sex are brought to mind. Triggered, as they say.

But, as I noted, there may be a solution to our current dilemma of Ovid’s place on America’s campuses. Why reinvent the wheel? If we’re going to be the new Victorians, then let’s be new Victorians. They were, after all, a people who possessed a kind of wonderfully hardheaded practicality, which they would apply even to the problems caused by their soft-headed sentimentalism.

Faced with the difficulty of obscenities in classic Roman texts, for example, Victorian translations would often leave the offensive passages untranslated. When you were reading along in an English translation and you suddenly got a few lines of Latin, you knew that something scandalous had just been described, even if your Latin wasn’t good enough to tell quite what.

The notion was, of course, that if you were educated enough to read the somewhat technical Latin description of sexual intercourse, then you were also presumably a person of sufficient sophistication and self-control not to be pruriently swayed by the indecent passages. The translator’s task was complete: No liberties were taken with Ovid, no bowdlerizings were imposed on the text. But the fair cheeks of maiden readers were spared a blush, and the imaginations of pure-minded boys were left unstained.

And isn’t that what those outraged students want? A remoralizing, a respiritualizing, a re-Grundying of the world? What would solve all of Columbia’s problems is a new English translation of the Metamorphoses that leaves the offensive passages in Latin. That way, Ovid can stay in the canon, and no triggers need be pulled in the reading of his work.

There were two seemingly unrelated news stories last week that The Scrapbook has been pondering. The first is about another high-profile campus rape story that seems to be falling apart. A student named Emma Sulkowicz turned her alleged rape in August 2012 into an art project, carrying a mattress around the Columbia University campus to symbolize her victimhood after the university had failed to expel her alleged rapist.

Last year, when elite universities began announcing their intentions to bring back ROTC, Jonathan E. Hillman and I cautioned that if Ivy League ROTC was to succeed, it would require a real commitment from both the schools and the military.

The Associated Press has been attacking the New York Police Department for . . . doing its job. As Bob McManus of the New York Post writes today, "Strip away the emotive rhetoric and what’s left is a series of stories over several weeks that show pretty clearly that the NYPD works very hard to keep the city safe — operating an aggressive and imaginative program, but staying well within both the law and the bounds of post-9/11 propriety from beginning to end."

Matthew Continetti, witness to history

Mike was from Ohio and rowed crew. Andrew was from China and spoke little English. Jeremy, from Long Island, arrived on campus with a pet snake. Jacob was interested in architecture. Amy had cheerful eyes and long black hair.

As expected, the Yale College faculty voted Thursday to remove all obstacles to hosting an on-campus ROTC program. The Yale Daily News reported a “significant majority” in favor. According to a source, support was so strong a simple show of hands was enough to decide the issue; no ballots necessary. Yale has been in talks with the Navy and Air Force about restoring its ROTC programs.

Yesterday was a big day for ROTC. Just three weeks after Columbia’s university senate voted in favor of engaging with ROTC, Columbia has announced it will reinstate its Navy ROTC program. The agreement between President Lee C. Bollinger and Navy secretary Ray Mabus marks the end of a 42-year ban on the program.

It's time to let Venezuela know their days as a sponsor of terrorism are numbered.

Amid the crisis in Japan and conflict in Libya, President Obama is scheduled to take a trip to South America this weekend. The President undoubtedly has a lot on his foreign policy plate, but while he's in the region the administration ought to give pay some needed attention to what's going on between Venezuela and Colombia.

Columbia University’s Task Force on Military Engagement just released its full report on ROTC. As previously reported, the student survey went in favor of bringing ROTC back to campus: Sixty percent of students approved restoring the program. A quick look at some of the findings:

Great news: Harvard University will officially recognize its Naval ROTC program tomorrow. The agreement – to be signed by Harvard president Drew Faust and Navy secretary Ray Mabus – marks the end of the school’s 41-year ban against the program.

“This is a place,” says Columbia University president Lee Bollinger of his Ivy League institution,

that respects ideas, values diversity of thought and experience and, perhaps most importantly, recognizes that what defines great scholarship is not the easy acceptance of what we already know, but the relentless determination to discover what we still have to learn.